Quote of the Week – alarmists missing targets

The problem the alarmists had, was that there was never anything substantial to hit back at. They had the equivalents of the big guns and the massive air support but there never was a skeptic HQ to be pounded, no big central organization, no massed ranks of skeptic soldiers or even any third-party backing the resistance.

Every one of the skeptics was a lone volunteer guerrilla fighter, who needed absolutely no logistical support of any kind to continue the fight indefinitely. The alarmists never understood this, preferring to think that there simply had to be some massive hidden organization orchestrating the resistance. While they wasted time and effort attacking targets that only existed in their head, each of the guerrillas chewed on them mercilessly in their own particular way.

Good observations……there is no coordination, everybody chewing like the ants at a
different corner….
and …. more observations:
(1) they march separately on their own, but bite simultaneously…..
(2) to avoid: to bite each other (or: ‘friendly fire’) ,
(3) some are blind, some walk backward …only some….but bite nevertheless…
.and soon they will have chewed CAGW to pieces ….
A few years of continuous cooling also helps…. lets enjoy the feast…
JS

Ross is right; it is over. Fakegate is a strategic disaster for the Alarmists. The battle analogy works very well. We skeptics never concentrated our forces and our adversaries never could effectively engage us. They wasted all their energy trying to identify a concentration of force that didn’t exist. To press the battle analogy further: Fakegate is an exploding powder magazine within the fortress or below the waterline. It is a self-inflicted disaster caused by the futile search for the enemies’ concentrated force (which doesn’t exist). Look at what they have done to themselves!

I love the description of us as guerrilla fighters. As America found out in Vietnam, Iraq, etc., these types of insurgencies are extremely hard to defeat, even with disproportionate advantages in technology and firepower. What the warmists don’t want to admit is that there are thousands of us out here, perhaps millions, who are simply looking for truth. Looking for an honest use of the scientific method. Finding spin, deceptions, censorship instead of truth, these multiple armies of one have become inflamed with indignation and determination. We’ve argued in the comment sections of newspapers, magazines, in blogs, on Facebook, on Tumblr. We’ve started our own blogs, asked rude questions in politicians’ town hall meetings, written to authors, organizations, legislators. And we’re willing to expend our own energies with no other reward than the inner satisfaction of trying to help people discern the propaganda.

Don’t forget green movement is similar. You may point your finger at Greenpeace but close it down and you’re still left with millions of green fanatics ready to tie themselves to trees or railroad tracks.

The concept of guerrilla fighters and insurgencies being extremely hard to defeat is pretty much an urban legend. The British showed this to be false in Malaysia in the 50’s. Contrary to popular belief, the US was winning the insurgency war in South Vietnam, even though it was handicapped with a Vietnamese government that lacked the confidence of much of the population. The Viet Minh were losing the fight prior to Tet and Tet effectively destroyed them as an operational force. In the end it was a massive invasion by conventional North Vietnamese forces that defeated the Sagion governement, aided in large part by Congress’ refusal to fund military supplies, mainly ammunition and helicopter parts. Iraq is another poor example of an insurgency winning out against a modern military force. In case you missed it, the insurgents lost and the US has pulled combat forces out.

Afghanistan may be an example where victory against an insurgency could prove true. As one of my nephews commented after his first deployment, it is a very difficult situation over there. In one valley they support and even love what Americans are doing for them. One valley over, they hate your guts and feed that hate to their babies through the breasts of their mothers. The one qualifier I might place on Afghanistan proving to be the exemption is whether or not you can classify it as a true insurgency. Large portions of the population have never really considered themselves to have any alliagence to a national government. Alliagence lies with the family, clan and tribe.

As I pointed out on this this blog a long time ago we always were a rag, tag and bobtail army.

As against their serried and well paid ranks: I won’t even bother to name them.

If you could even describe us as an army as such: I am not sure we were quite that organised frankly.

However, more or less we have done the job, effectually the war is over and the rest is mopping up. Credit to all.

The first true and major battle and indeed information war fought on the World Wide Web: and a lesson to those who imagine they can control the news and propagate propaganda with their mighty resources. Not any more.

They can try, and will fail.

This a new and open world, it may take a generation yet, which I will not live to see, to confirm that it is. Nothing on this scale has been seen since printing and the rise of literacy. How it will all work out I do not know.

But I think it will be for the better: and do assure you that your grandchildren will take it all in their stride.

Fakegate is an exploding powder magazine within the fortress or below the waterline.
============
More like a torpedo that once launched, couldn’t find the target vessel, then looped back and attacked the only vessel it could find. The ship that launched it.

The storyline is the training of the young Arthur by Merlin. Merlin is particularly good at taking Arthur into situations where they become different animals and have to look at life through different eyes. Anyway, Merlin and Madam Mim engage in duel to the death one day. They start off in good wizard style with shape-changing into different animals, each change intended to outwit the other. Madam Mim starts to get narked with Merlin’s baiting strategy. When he turns into an elephant, she turns herself into an aullay – which sounds like a kind of mastodon. Merlin disappears. Then Mim as mastodon breaks out in spots, mumps, pustules, coughs, fevers, and finally rolls over, defeated. Merlin, who can time travel, has come back from the twentieth century with its knowledge of illnesses as living organisms, which he has impersonated, one after another.

Don’t forget green movement is similar. You may point your finger at Greenpeace but close it down and you’re still left with millions of green fanatics ready to tie themselves to trees or railroad tracks.
======
To succeed, a guerilla movement needs the support of the local population. That’s why the surge in Iraq worked. Once the locals no longer feared the terrorists, they were willing to work with the Allied forces to point out the terrorists.

ONce the populace no longer believes that these activists are working for the greater good, the populace is no longer willing to put up with the inconveniences and depravations the “activists” cause. At which point it becomes easier and easier for law enforcement to track them down and capture them.

Skeptics have the only organizations that count: Mother Nature, and several centuries of sound scientific methodology to provide them with reliable constraints to discern what they know vs what they think they know about how she works and what she’s up to.

Timg56 talks sense. Two riders: the american generals and colonels of Vietnam had their formative experience in Korea; second US intelligence (hahhahaha) didn’t work out until quite late in the day that North Vietnam’s sponsors were Russia not China. Accordingly, the obvious strategy, of invading N Vietnam, was rejected on the grounds that it would risk another Korea, with the Chinese piling in.

Well, my part has been small indeed, miniscule, actually…but every student that comes into my classroom walks out at least hearing that AGW is bunk and that there is another side to the story. I hope hope it at least gives them a small pause for thought when they hear or read climate propaganda. Hope.

The bitter pill for me, is that none of them will ever stand in a court of law to answer charges of crimes against humanity for the deaths, starvation and poverty that their policies inflicted on the poor around the world. We must now move to get those policies reversed.

I know it’s a whimsy but…
AD9. Quinctilius Varus led his three legions, their auxiliaries, families and servants, a consensus of conquerors, apparently in pursuit of a great insurrection and a decisive battle. As they went through the forests and swamps they were picked off, split up, harried by guerillas and finally, exhausted, annihilated, never having brought the fabled enemy to open battle. It was an immense disaster and spelled the end for Roman hopes across the Rhine.
So it goes for Mann and his cohorts too (who have now reached the forests and swamps in this scenario). I wonder if Hansen will finally wander round his lab, like Augustus, tearing at his clothes and crying, ” Svante August Arrhenius, give me back my three degrees.”

I’ve never actually thought of myself in that way…but hey it’s true!
And not only do I comment on-line…for the last 10 years, in my daily life I have
attacked the Hoax. Lost a few social contacts over it… well worth it though.
Looks like it’s working at last.

This line about massive funding of skeptics is a constant refrain among all warmist groups. It’s really strange to watch supposedly serious people (as in academia – and not the PC fruitcakes) trot this line out when it’s so easily refuted.

I responded to the above thusly:

The warmists’ Big-Oil-funding charges aren’t so much wrong as misleading and exaggerated. Certain skeptics do work for free market think tanks; certain climate-skeptical foundations no doubt get some of their money from someone who has some interest in global warming being wrong; certain skeptical get-togethers and book-publications are provided by think tanks with links, however tenuous, to Big Oil; some skeptical scientists have received a portion of their grants, at least indirectly, from interested parties; and numerous skeptical scientists are members of, or have spoken at dinner-events sponsored by, free market think tanks, etc.

The main thing wrong with this line of thinking, as pointed out by Judy Curry, is that the scientists with the closest links to such think tanks aren’t the ones having the major impact on the debate. It’s mostly been scientists in academia like Lindzen and Spencer who have made an impact, followed by independent, grass-roots bloggers–who have had more impact than funded institutions with a web presence.

Second, the amounts have been exaggerated. For instance, a think tank like Cato may devote maybe 5% of its income to the GW topic, But its opponents will add up ALL the income that is received by such think tanks and claim, in the newsletters they send to members, that “GW-skeptical organizations have received $100 million this quarter,” falsely implying that ALL that money was devoted to anti-AGW activity.

Third, there’s a false implication about what being “affiliated with” a think tank implies. It may only mean speaking at a luncheon, subscribing to their journal, having an article published in their journal, or serving on a board of advisors about the topic. These are usually fairly peripheral associations, with little cash involved; i.e., looser links that the accusers’ language would lead readers to suspect. It’s not as though Lindzen and Spencer are hunkered down in a bunker with the Koch brothers, although that is the impression the accusers have successfully (in many cases) communicated to their readers.

Fourth, the money received by a grant doesn’t go into the recipient’s pocket. It goes through the university office, which takes a hefty cut for general overhead, then it goes mostly for expenses, like salaries of grad-student researchers and lab workers.

Fifth, most academic researchers have far more to lose than gain in terms of funding, career advancement, and social status by taking the skeptical side. So few opportunists would leap at an offer from Big Oil.

Can you imagine if you’re a climate scientist the feeling of having Steve McIntire latched onto you and burrowing relentlessly inward like some godawful mutated insect in a science fiction movie? You try pullling it off, burning it off, using a harsh chemical, and yet it just keeps burrowing. Relentlessly. Can you imagine the terror of that? Get it off me! Get it off me! But it’s not going anywhere.

What’s that description of the Terminator?“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” – Kyle Reese (The Terminator, 1984)
Imagine facing that when you know your work is shoddy.

Warmists have convinced themselves that there is a [non existent] well funded climate [change] denialist machine out there somewhere. This is why Gleick is in so much trouble. $6.4 million or $7.5 million per year. WOW!

Finally, where is my OIL MONEY???? I have kids to feed and need a nice car. ;>)

Well, my part has been small indeed, miniscule, actually…but every student that comes into my classroom walks out at least hearing that AGW is bunk and that there is another side to the story.
===============================================
There’s an obvious witty remark to make from that, but I’ll pass and only state, ……That isn’t minuscule! Well done, Jenn

“The problem the alarmists had, was that there was never anything substantial to hit back at. … there never was a skeptic HQ to be pounded, no big central organization, no massed ranks of skeptic soldiers or even any third-party backing the resistance.”

so far as i can tell, who got the money won.
they got the money and they are getting more.
they aren’t being chewed apart, they’re being razzed – and they are whining all the way to the bank. they’ve lost nothing of consequence – we have.
and the good old days aren’t coming back. all gone with the 401k.
we lost and keep losing. still not one single trial or incarceration.
they don’t have to call it science any more if they don’t want to. they can just call it tithing to the church of climatology.
we get what we pay for and more- we get what we settle for.
we lose and we freakin deserve it. we didn’t chew anything but their rags. so they’re naked, big deal. they laugh to the bank naked, now is the only difference.
did we win anything? i don’t think so!

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t much agree with a polarizing polemic like this. But the truth of the matter, as I have personally, directly experienced it is, that the top tier of AGW alarmists ARE bullies– who well deserve Pointman’s treatment. Well stated. Charge on!

The peculating Green Gang of Luddite sociopaths continually reverts to Big Oil libels and slanders, when all are naught but Big Government, New World Order shills of the most compromised, corrupt, malfeasant sort.

Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth and all their ilk are nothing more that driveling placemen tooting bureaucratic/regulatory horns in sabotage of global energy economies. Not one exhibits any grain of character, integrity, or even self-respect, marching in proctocratic lockstep to paymasters’ drums.

Spot On with the assessment Ross. The alarmists are pretty much of the same mindset that saw the 60’s counterculture as a movement fighting the alleged “establishment” when it was really just fighting not just a set of shared mores and norms ( as outmoded as some of them might have been) but also that essence of the enlightenment, independent minded common sense. It is that tribal sense of conformity to the revolution that remains including all the kowtowing to their shamans, witchdoctors, icons, idols, fears, phobias and and pure , unadulterated prejudices the other detritus of tribalism. In that light it is very clear that there are a large number of journalists and commentators who joined up with the eco gangsters out of solidarity with them being the latest incarnation of the counterculture to who they owe fealty. These are not free thinking people, they are intellectual cowards who hunt in packs, chanting their slogans for courage.

I thought gorillas were at threat from AGW ………. Oh wait!
Sorry never could take this sort of thing too seriously – next thing us skeptics will think we’re so damn heroic and deserving of all sorts of accolades. But the true mark of a skeptical scientist is that they don’t care about other people’s opinions.

Don’t try to take too much credit, guys!
Nature is having her very big say in all of this. She is refusing to co-operate almost totally with the warmists.
It could have been and would have been very different if there had been another big solar cycle underway right now or the PDO had not changed or the man made GFC had not come along and suddenly made the citizenery and the politicals realise that their wallets were getting very thin and they must cut back on those societal luxuries that the climate elite were forever demanding and for which they had been well humoured in the past .
All the chest beating in the world won’t alter the fact that it is a capricious and unpredictable , Nature that has turned the tide on the warmist zealots.
All the skeptics have done is to proclaim this to the world and the world is now at last,slowly starting to listen and wonder and question what the ruckus was all about and ask; why should we suffer and pay for something which the skeptics now tell us, isn’t even happening and never was.

To succeed, a guerilla movement needs the support of the local population. That’s why the surge in Iraq worked. Once the locals no longer feared the terrorists, they were willing to work with the Allied forces to point out the terrorists.
___________________________

That explains why Greens are so successful. I’d say they even have more ‘local population’ support than climate skeptics have. Just compare:

Greens: let’s save the nature, it will cost you just a little
Skeptics: let’s stop wasting money on Green nonsense, we need money to improve our own lives

People are only slowly starting to realize that the ‘it will cost you just a little’ is a big fat lie. But apart of that, people always think that saving themselves is inferior to saving something else.

Part of ‘know your enemy’ is also ‘don’t underestimate your enemy’. Green movement is pretty much the same guerilla as climate skepticism (or realism, or whatever you like). Actually it was here sooner, skepticism would never need to raise if Greens weren’t so successful.

We come here and and other blogs to – share, read, have fun, learn, test, enjoy a debate, challenge and share some more.
Meanwhile onlookers and acquaintances are being told and so we grow. We are not at all like a single entity, we are many, we are efficient, we are growing, and we will win.

“The problem the alarmists had, was that there was never anything substantial to hit back at. … there never was a skeptic HQ to be pounded, no big central organization, no massed ranks of skeptic soldiers or even any third-party backing the resistance.”

The science is unequivocally on the side of the skeptics. The planet’s feedback response to a change in temperature forcing (any forcing change) is to resist the forcing change (negative feedback) rather than positive (amplify forcing change). The planet’s atmosphere resists forcing changes (negative feedback) by an increase or decrease in planetary clouds particularly in the tropics which increases or decreases the amount of sunlight that is reflected into space.

Analysis of top of the atmosphere radiation changes Vs temperature changes clearly indicates that planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative. Actual measured warming is significantly less than that predicted by the IPCC. There has been no net warming for the last 10 years.

If the planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative (resist changes by increasing or decreasing clouds particularly in the tropics) the amount of warming due to a doubling of CO2 be less than 1C with most of the warming occurring at high latitudes which will cause the biosphere to expand. The warming due to atmospheric CO2 increases is positive, it will cause the biosphere to expand.

Carbon dioxide is not a poison. Plants eat CO2. Plant yield increases and growing times decrease when atmospheric CO2 is increased. Commercial greenhouses inject CO2 into the greenhouse to increase yield and decrease growing times. A doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in an increase in cereal crop yields of roughly 30% to 40%.

When atmospheric CO2 increases plants reduce the number of stomata on their leaves which reduces the amount of water they lose to evaporation. When the atmospheric CO2 increases plants can make more effective use of water. (Another benefit due to increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.)

Carbon dioxide is one of the essential ingredients in green plant growth and is a primary environmental factor in greenhouses. CO2 enrichment at 2, 3 or four times natural concentration will cause plants to grow faster and improve plant will quality.

Carbon dioxide is an odorless gas and a minor constituent in the air we breathe. It comprises only .03% [ 300 parts per million, or PPM] of the atmosphere, but is virtually important to all life on this planet!

The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers). Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.

My first thought about Pointman’s essay, is how churlish it is to ignore the contribution of Megan McArdle. She is on the ‘other side’ in his romanticizing military metaphor, but as best as I can tell she did more than any other individual to expose the forgery.

The next disappointment is more than sixty comments without anyone making this point.

The extreme AGW paradigm promoters spend all of their effort fabricating and pushing a CO2 catastrophe. It is truly astonishing that they appear to be obvious to the science and fundamental economics.

The cost of what is being proposed will bankrupt Western countries and will have no significant effect on reducing CO2 rise – which is not a problem anyway. In addition to bankrupting Western Countries the same proposed programs will detrimentally effect the environment. It is difficult to understand why logic and reason is absent from the extreme AGW movement policy formation.

Vast amounts of agricultural land are being diverted from crops for human consumption to biofuel The immediate consequence of this is a dramatic increase in the cost of basic food such as a 140% increase in the price of corn. Due to limited amounts of agricultural land vast regions of virgin forest are being cut down for biofuel production. The problems associate with this practice will become acute as all major Western governments have mandate a percentage of biofuel.

The Clean Energy Scam
The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline. Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-04-14/biofuel-production-a-crime-against-humanity/2403402
Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’
Massive production of biofuels is “a crime against humanity” because of its impact on global food prices, a UN official has told German radio. “Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler told Bayerischer Runfunk radio. Many observers have warned that using arable land to produce crops for biofuels has reduced surfaces available to grow food. Mr Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change its policies on agricultural

Thanks Pointman even if I tend to agree with the comparison to el Alamein. Well, my part is probably close to Intelligence – nearly all of which was done of course behind the scenes, but led to such things as the “heroes of Telemark” who took out the heavy-water plant at Rjukan, and no doubt a great deal more if I were to inform myself of the now-available details.

Two more heroes inspire me. Both became, in time, great kings.

One is David. Not just against Goliath, but subsequently. Few realize that Saul became so jealous of David that for several years he was on the run and in hiding, even though he’d been anointed king… that’s what the Psalms are about, and that’s why they ricochet from despair to hope all the time.

The other inspiration is our king Alfred rightly called the Great. He too was in hiding and on the run. I still choke in the throat when I recall his astounding story. He is my inspiration for the wiki I am still preparing behind the scenes (anyone interested in helping, please email me). He knew it was necessary to rebuild strategically. It was not enough to ambush W M C Guthrum the Dane, not enough to babysit warmists Guthrum through conversion to true science Christianity. It was necessary to rebuild, strategically. Our UK counties originate from this time. Each county established a fortified county town from which no part in the shire was more than a day’s ride distant.

Someone in comments over at Richard Black’s blog told him that they can’t win because they are engaged in guerrilla warfare. They have indeed convinced themselves that their failure must be due to a [non-existent] well funded, ‘climate change’ denialist machine. A spark of truth can defeat a mountain of lies [Gleick et. al].

Never in the history of the world has any movement received so much financing, so much political support, media backing and failed so miserably as the global warming movement.

Warmists, please pay attention to Pointman’s great observation about Fakegate:

On the day the material was published, the realists knew something concrete straight away while the alarmists fervently hoped they had something concrete. We knew it was suspect whereas they hoped it was true.

We knew it was suspect because we each knew there was no massive hidden organisation controlling and backing our efforts and there never has been either.

ABC radio National on Aus today had R williams supporting Gleick.
and that mob who he isnt working for..doing agit prop in schools
to fight us uninformed??? sceptics
and proposals for censorship of most comms inc personal blogs.

I have fought the evil anti-human thing that environmentalism metastasised into for many years. I’ve seen good people I had a regard for smashed into the ground by it, because in all innocence, they simply couldn’t help but voice their honest concerns about the simple accuracy of the science or the logical implications of its policies, both for humanity in general and the most vulnerable people on the planet in particular.

Those people were too civilised and decent to understand what they were dealing with; raw naked brutality, so they were destroyed by it. They lost tenure, they lost jobs and they lost that inner optimism that every true scientist still retains in their silly, secret, heart of hearts, about some innate goodness or at least some basic objectivity that they always believed was at the centre of science. What they could never understand was that scientific integrity was irrelevant, it was always about politics, power and money.

They were casualties of war and shouldn’t be forgotten, though they have been. Perhaps in the decades to come, someone will tell their stories. They were good people and deserve that.

[End of excerpt]

I have friends who have given up the fight, brutalized by vicious attacks on their careers, themselves and their families. Thank you Pointman, for remembering them. – Allan

________________________________

Excerpt:

I think the tide finally started to turn about six months before Climategate I and the Copenhagen debacle. Since then, for a number of reasons and following the various “gates”, it’s all been downhill for the alarmists. I gave my thoughts on why it happened in this piece here but the sheer speed of the movement’s implosion has caught everyone by surprise, including me.

[End of excerpt]

This statement reminds me of the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989.

Five of us were on a multi-week trip to West Germany in July 1989, when at the last minute we were asked to also travel to East Germany for a long weekend to meet with industry representatives there. One of our group refused on conscientious grounds, and we met him later in Cologne. The rest of us saw a piece of history – the last days of the repressive East German Honecker regime.

We arrived at Tegel Airport in West Berlin on a Friday night, and were met by an East German Stasi driver in a VW minibus. We were driven through West Berlin, alive with bright lights and partying crowds, and entered East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie just before dusk. A sharp left turn and there was the Brandenburg Gate to our left; a right turn onto Unter den Linden, and to our left was the Reichstag. I raised my camera to take a picture and our driver screeched to a halt – this seemed a dangerous move and I braced in case our vehicle was rear-ended – just then that I realized ours was the only vehicle on the street, and there were no pedestrians. The contrast with the vibrant energy of West Berlin was startling – the sun was not just setting physically, it seemed to have suddenly vanished spiritually as well. Where the hell was everyone?

We arrived at our hotel, the Metropole, and later had dinner with our hosts. I was admonished over dinner conversation that “we do not jog in East Berlin”. I asked if I could go for a walk, and was told ”You can walk anywhere in East Berlin. You will be perfectly safe. Not like your New York and Los Angeles.” We went for a stroll after dinner and understood the comment – in every block there were eight police guardposts, each about the size of a bus shelter, encased in dark glass, to prevent East Germans from trying to defect through the nearby Western Embassies.

We walked past a storm sewer grate and the smell almost knocked me down – I realized then that the East Germans did not treat their sanitary sewage – they merged it with their storm runoff and dumped it into the rivers – yuck!

In the next two days we travelled though the city and countryside, visited an operating mine and had lengthy meetings in a very hot room with our counterparts. I was generally impressed with the professionalism of our hosts and particularly our interpreter, who had a remarkable memory.

I was totally unimpressed with everything else in East Germany – the people were terrified of authority and particularly of any unauthorized contact with us Westerners, clearly identifiable by our clothing – the newer buildings has rivers of rust running down their facades, probably because re-bar had not been properly buried in the concrete and was corroding dangerously – the mechanical and electrical systems were WW2 vintage, and the electronics were decades behind ours. East Germans were well-fed, but lived frightened, grey lives behind the barbed wire of the Wall.

We were fed up with the East and left a day early without our Stasi driver, made our way to Checkpoint Charlie and were allowed to leave after a rather thorough checkout process. We walked around West Berlin, and saw a memorial to those who had been killed trying to escape from East Berlin. Officially 136 people were killed trying to escape across the Wall, and hundreds more were wounded. The last person to be shot and killed trying to escape was Chris Gueffroy, on February 6, 1989. He was shot ten times in the chest and died between the wire fences. Chris Gueffroy was twenty years old.

Later, our West German industrial hosts quizzed us at length about what we saw – most had never been into the East. I described the fear I saw in the eyes of East German people, and the terrible state of their physical plant – the buildings, mechanical and electrical systems, highways, railways and the lack of sewage treatment. I ventured that given the political situation, the East German regime could not last, but I was thinking it would take five to ten years for the Wall to fall. It took 4 months.

Maybe that is the real “tipping point” that the global warmists are so worried about. There is a point when they will just drown in cesspools of their own BS. Let us hope that day is soon.

Denouement

A few years later, I returned to Berlin with two colleagues. We walked from the West toward the Brandenburg Gate, and although I no longer jogged due to cratered knees, I asked my friends if they would excuse me for a few minutes. I broke into a slow painful jog, passed under the Brandenburg Gate and ran a short distance down Unter Den Linden into former East Berlin. A curious sight for passing motorists, no doubt, but a small triumph for those of us who remember the dark days of East Germany.

Allan:
You gave the system 5 to 10 years to collapse, because ist was bound to collapse…..
Now its the turn of the Warmist cause: another 5 – 10 years?
But: as you pointed out: Historical progress often self-accelerates and the system
collapsed very much earlier…….
I bet this self-acceleration mechanism will also apply to the Warmists….
Lets observe for 2-3 years and you will see the difference
JS

Yes, Ross is spot on…… However the Socialists and ecofascists have now understood their mistake and are right now setting about rectifying that very oversight, specially here in Australia. Right now we have a media enquiry underway by our Socialist Labor Government in which an activist judge and an embittered ex newspaper editor are in charge of….and suprise, suprise, they have a raft of sweeping “reforms” to give to the government…… Also I have noted in the mainstream media recently, a slowly growing and unhealthy emphasis on curbing “cyber bullying” and clamping down on “hate” speech or “offensive” speech by bloggers and posters….. The move is on to take away the freedom of the internet, they are desperately trying to isolate our concerned and vocal multitudes.

We are now in desperate times…… The thing with reality is that unlike the movies, there is no swelling music to cue the serious parts….. One must have the insight to see impending disaster before it strikes. With Socialist governments like Australia’s Labor party or Obama’s presidency only twelve months from the likelihood of being overthrown, they will be stung to extremism to hang on to power. The long standing Socialist bureaucracies that lie hidden and dormant between conservative status quo governments know that there is a purge coming this time around and they will do anything to stop it.

While we’re on a roll, can I draw everyone’s attention to Donna Laframboise’s blog ‘No Frakking Concensus’ in which she links to a book which contains a pretty explosive criticism of our friend Rajendra Pachauri by an Indian High court judge in 1996.
It implies that, as we say in the UK, he shouldn’t be put in charge of a whelk stall (translation for our overseas cousins; whelks are a small shellfish popular in the East End of London, and bought from small market stalls set up in shopping areas…)…
Anyway, you get the picture…

Big Climate suffered from its own sense of self importance and such hubris would lead to so much human folly in making ridiculous predictions that would ultimately out them as non-scientific charlatans and snake oil merchants. They need to be globally notorised and outed for that now. We need to know and place their faces and their names with their gross exaggerations. Not just Gore, Mann, Jones, Hansen, Pachauri, and now Gleick that strode the world stage with their nonsense, but the local versions in countries like Australia. Chief among them Tim Flannery who was made Climate Change Commissioner on the basis of his alarmist spruiking for the cause. Not only about lack of rainfall in future, but spouting alarmism over sea level rise, only to turn around and buy estuarine waterfront property himself.

There is one name that is now sullied beyond all others and no true scientist will want to be associated with it an any way shape or form from now on. That is the derogatory term- ‘Climatologist’, for it now represents the description of anyone who would be so presumptuous and full of human hubris to take such a mantle. A mantle now of ignorance and scientific shame given that so many of its wearers have claimed the climate science is settled and anyone who disagrees are akin to Holocaust deniers. You wear the brand of Climatologist from here on and you wear its rotten, anti-science stench.

There are those, such as Dr. Mann, who think we are in a “Climate War”. Those types of thinkers want to muzzle anyone who disagrees with them because they are sure they are correct, and everyone else is wrong. The problem is, the science put forth by the proponents of said “Climate War” is so shoddy, that under examination, fails. Rather than admit how shoddy this is openly, and try to rectify the mistakes so that the evidence bears scrutiny, they keep repeating the shoddy science. IF Dr. Mann had used the Sargasso Sea proxy data, it would have shown his original paper to be totally false. For some reason, he omitted this data, even in his newer paper.

The resolution of proxy data is not definitive enough to prove that we are warmer presently than in the recent past….(Last 12,000 YBP). If anyone thinks that proxy data shows a 30 year trend with high certainty, I have a bridge to sell. There are resons for error bars in stats, and in most cases anything that falls within 1 or 2 sigma has the same probability of happening as the “Dark Line” that is shown.

The idea that physics can’t show a cause and affect to some happenings shows that we don’t know WHY as of yet…….but on observation we KNOW it is happening. We must keep looking for the why, and the current loudest folks have stopped looking.

The supporters of the “Climate War” will loose the war because their intel (knowledge) is limited by their blinders.

If AGW comes up in conversation, spread the seed of doubt.
If possible, add comments to media articles mentioning AGW.
If you see bias, look for a ‘Complain’ button.
If you can rate other people’s comments, do so.
If you browse something that Anthony should see, shout.
If you get polled forget the science, pick whichever answer seems worst for them.
If you find yourself on an alarmist site, leave them a little something to show you are diappointed. Vent spleen if you must, but despite rumours to the contrary the opposition are actually human beings who will find nice people a lot harder to shrug off than nasty people.

It could maybe be better expressed as “Warmists lack targets”. So they invent them. The Massively Funded Carefully Organized Skeptic Conspiracy is a perennial fave. Blasting hallucinations has only unintended consequences, however!!

I posted the following at RPjnr’s site last week
“The problem here is that Gleick and many contributors to the more alarmist blogs (DeSmog particularly) appear to believe their self-constructed narrative of the ‘skeptic / denier’ has to be true.

They seem to find it impossible to consider that reasonably intelligent and scientifically literate people can see the same data about recent warming and the future projections and honestly hold the opinion that it is not an existential crisis about which something* has to be done now. Therefore anyone who disagrees with them MUST be in the pay of big business and part of the denial machine whose sole purpose is to spread disinformation. As such, any action against them is justified and justifiable, even when it turns out that the ‘well-funded’ organisation promoting the disinformation has a lower annual budget than the IPCC’s annual travel expences budget (and apparently none of it comes from ‘Big Oil’).

* Something, in this case, usually seems to involve building wind turbines or solar power plants that cannot provide adequate and reliable power on anything like the scale of the fossil fuel plants they are meant to replace. The one proven technology that could provide a low carbon, abundant energy future in the middle term, nuclear fusion, is also against the beliefs of many for ideological more than technological reasons.”

Isn’t one of the first rules of war to know and understand your enemy? The likes of Mann and Gleick seem to be unable to do this, instead only being able to see conspiracies in the shadows.

“We’re stuck. I am completely at a loss as to what’s going on.”
[…]
“There’s this whole body of work, including my own, that’s based on the old assumptions, so changing the picture completely would mean going back to scratch and starting again,” he said.”

Correct in all you said, in addition…..
President Johnson had “Operation Phoenix” 1967 – 1972. Johnson’s regime systematically exterminated anyone suspected of being a Viet Cong (South Vietnamese Communist). By the Tet Offensive there were no more Viet Cong. Operations in South Vietnam were being conducted by the NVA with the support of a few “recruited” to the cause.

Col. Harry Summers related a conversation he had with his corresponding NVA officer at the Paris Peace Conference. Harry said something to the effect: “We never lost a battle”. The reply was something like: “That may be so, but that is beside the point”. (I must have loaned out my copy of Summers’ book “On Strategy”; it is missing from my book shelf.)

Global warming may be real, but the cause is not CO2 or green house gasses. NASA scientists have said the temperature of the surrounding planets are also rising (this fact is of course, suppressed by the MSM). Its solar warming.

Such is the skeptics’ nature that they don’t even believe what each other are saying, so it is truly not possible to organize them, which is why it is such a ramshackle bunch of diverse thoughts with no basic science to bind them. A sad situation, but what can you do?

Jim D.
This is no problem, this can be helped… its already out in German:
The Warmists scare: ISBN 978-3-86805-604-4 on German Amazon.de.
– unrefuted/unrefutable-…..
Once the English version is out, then we are a step further, can unite
and bring the Warmist elephant down to its knees
No problem just a matter of time…3 years max.
JS

“We’re stuck. I am completely at a loss as to what’s going on.”
[…]
“There’s this whole body of work, including my own, that’s based on the old assumptions, so changing the picture completely would mean going back to scratch and starting again,” he said.”

To Jim D.
From the title: One should expect posts with hard core numerical content for all the
Skeptics number crunchers….. but there are also generalists and newcomers who
dare to speak / + should speak about general topics because we need every hand to
chew the Warmists down to their deserved size…. and you can also do your part….
JS

A true story from the UK – 2015
As the CAGW scam finally unravels, many former ‘climate scientists’ find themselves applying for the dole. One fellow applies for a job in ‘Y Mart’ as an environmental officer

On his first day, expecting a huge role in saving the planetshere, the supervisor hands him a broom.

‘My God, dont you realise, I am a professor of climate science, with a fellowship at the Royal Society’

‘Sorry sir. I didnt realise. We will put you on a two day training course, starting tomorrow’

Global warming may be real, but the cause is not CO2 or green house gasses. NASA scientists have said the temperature of the surrounding planets are also rising (this fact is of course, suppressed by the MSM). Its solar warming.

References, please! I’ve seen some, but I haven’t seen any since Earth’s temperature plateaued.

Two profound events triggered the split between those advocating a pragmatic or “liberal” approach to ecology and the new “zero-tolerance” attitude of the extremists. The first event, mentioned previously, was the widespread adoption of the environmental agenda by the mainstream of business and government. This left environmentalists with the choice of either being drawn into collaboration with their former “enemies” or of taking ever more extreme positions. Many environmentalists chose the latter route. They rejected the concept of “sustainable development” and took a strong “anti-development” stance.

Surprisingly enough the second event that caused the environmental movement to veer to the left was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.

These factors have contributed to a new variant of the environmental movement that is so extreme that many people, including myself, believe its agenda is a greater threat to the global environment than that posed by mainstream society. Some of the features of eco-extremism are:

• It is anti-human. The human species is characterized as a “cancer” on the face of the earth. The extremists perpetuate the belief that all human activity is negative whereas the rest of nature is good. This results in alienation from nature and subverts the most important lesson of ecology; that we are all part of nature and interdependent with it. This aspect of environmental extremism leads to disdain and disrespect for fellow humans and the belief that it would be “good” if a disease such as AIDS were to wipe out most of the population.

• It is anti-technology and anti-science. Eco-extremists dream of returning to some kind of technologically primitive society. Horse-logging is the only kind of forestry they can fully support. All large machines are seen as inherently destructive and “unnatural’. The Sierra Club’s recent book, “Clearcut: the Tradgedy of Industrial Forestry”, is an excellent example of this perspective. “Western industrial society” is rejected in its entirety as is nearly every known forestry system including shelterwood, seed tree and small group selection. The word “Nature” is capitalized every time it is used and we are encouraged to “find our place” in the world through “shamanic journeying” and “swaying with the trees”. Science is invoked only as a means of justifying the adoption of beliefs that have no basis in science to begin with.

• It is anti-organization. Environmental extremists tend to expect the whole world to adopt anarchism as the model for individual behavior. This is expressed in their dislike of national governments, multinational corporations, and large institutions of all kinds. It would seem that this critique applies to all organizations except the environmental movement itself. Corporations are critisized for taking profits made in one country and investing them in other countries, this being proof that they have no “allegiance” to local communities. Where is the international environmental movements allegiance to local communities? How much of the money raised in the name of aboriginal peoples has been distributed to them? How much is dedicated to helping loggers thrown out of work by environmental campaigns? How much to research silvicultural systems that are environmentally and economically superior?

• It is anti-trade. Eco-extremists are not only opposed to “free trade” but to international trade in general. This is based on the belief that each “bioregion” should be self-sufficient in all its material needs. If it’s too cold to grow bananas – – too bad. Certainly anyone who studies ecology comes to realize the importance of natural geographic units such as watersheds, islands, and estuaries. As foolish as it is to ignore ecosystems it is adsurd to put fences around them as if they were independent of their neighbours. In its extreme version, bioregionalism is just another form of ultra-nationalism and gives rise to the same excesses of intolerance and xenophobia.

• It is anti-free enterprise. Despite the fact that communism and state socialism has failed, eco-extremists are basically anti-business. They dislike “competition” and are definitely opposed to profits. Anyone engaging in private business, particularly if they are sucessful, is characterized as greedy and lacking in morality. The extremists do not seem to find it necessary to put forward an alternative system of organization that would prove efficient at meeting the material needs of society. They are content to set themselves up as the critics of international free enterprise while offering nothing but idealistic platitudes in its place.

• It is anti-democratic. This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of radical environmentalism. The very foundation of our society, liberal representative democracy, is rejected as being too “human-centered”. In the name of “speaking for the trees and other species” we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism. The “planetary police” would “answer to no one but Mother Earth herself”.

• It is basically anti-civilization. In its essence, eco-extremism rejects virtually everything about modern life. We are told that nothing short of returning to primitive tribal society can save the earth from ecological collapse. No more cities, no more airplanes, no more polyester suits. It is a naive vision of a return to the Garden of Eden.

Apologies for being somewhat OT – a bit more on East Germany and the Berlin Wall, and the global warming scam:

In July 1989 our group of four Canadian businessmen were in a long meeting with our East German counterparts in a very warm room in East Berlin. Our counterparts were very professional, and our interpreter was extremely capable. She wrote no notes, except for numbers, and spoke for several minutes at a time, translating long technical discourses with obvious precision.

The meeting, however, was going nowhere. The West German heavy equipment we were being asked to review was so primitive, compared to its West German counterparts, that there was no chance we would ever use it in Canada.

Our hosts had provided some soft drinks (aka soda pop), unrefrigerated and without ice, on the meeting table. I picked up one small bottle and noted it was called “Prick Cola”. Our trip leader, Wayne, was droning away to my immediate left, aided by our capable interpreter. God it was hot and boring. I took the bottle of Prick Cola in my hand, covered the word Cola, and started to fiddle with it in a slightly distracting way. When I saw Wayne look down at the bottle and focus on it, I made a quick 1cm upward thrusting motion, right in the middle of his speech. He let out a loud guffaw, and then quickly regained control and continued with his talk.

To this day, I wonder who they named “Prick Cola” after – my bet is Erich Honecker, the man who built the dreaded Berlin Wall, and ruled brutal East Germany in its final days.

How does this all relate to global warming?

As Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, said (above), “the second event that caused the environmental movement to veer to the left was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.”

I have no personal experience like that of Patrick Moore with the radicalization of the environmental movement. I was involved in the environmental movement in the 1960’s when we wanted to stop municipalities and industries from discharging raw effluent into rivers and the atmosphere. That was largely accomplished in the 1970’s and 1980’s as Moore correctly states. Since then, the environmental movement has become increasingly radical, and increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps the global warming scam is simply another manifestation of this radicalization, as former leftists try to gain political power by other means, since their economic models have so obviously failed.

Their problem is that their climate models are no better than their economic models. The climate models, based on (false) strong positive feedbacks to CO2, have grossly over-predicted global warming, and there has been NO net global warming for a decade or so. There is no evidence that strong positive feedbacks to CO2 exist, and significant evidence that such feedbacks, if they exist, would have to be small and negative.

This is spot-on….however, the parties which have the most to lose (trillions) can wield stupendous resources, change and make or re-interpret laws and hound skeptics to the ground under various pretenses. The scam was working perfectly for the Warmists, but the chaps who think that they can predict climate, couldn’t predict the impact of the Web…even while they were using it… and how blogs would democratize information and would kick the feet under the compliant mainstram media. Their most logical counter-attack then will involve censorshiop; creative legislative and maybe even extra-legal ways to shut down, control, impoverish or otherwise disable bloggers.

Allan MacRae, that’s a very important point to remember, the collapse of the socialists in the West due to their unsustainable narratives, as streams of refugees, unjustifiable brutalities by communist and socialist regimes and finally, the economic collapse of those systems.

Your comments and Pointman’s excellent piece triggered a few memories. Thinking back to the late 70s and early 80s, I recall how the leftists I knew personally began getting exercised over pollution, logging and other environmental issues. It confused me and it confused the few genuine environmentalists I knew, because this switch happened as if out of nowhere and made little sense. There were no parallel environmental movements or policies in the communist world and, after all, anyone who had been in a communist country, knew what utter disgusting and poisoned disasters those countries had become. This rather sudden “migration” of socialists masquerading as libertarians and peace lovers into the CAGW’s political arms explains their tactics and strategies as well. The authoritarianism, shutting-off of debate, threats, slimy propaganda targetting children and repetition of obvious lies are all hallmarks of restrictive regimes, but seem to work remarkable well in democratic environments as long as government bureaucracies, universities, unions, established media and entertainment industries and monopolistic corporations, banks, UN and government-sponsored NGOs and other tightly-controlled entities are involved.

O, and many of those leftists who switched from pacifism and defending communists dictatorships and moved onto labour rights and environmentalism are in academia, education or the media now.

If I may take the liberty to re-post something scary by Pamela Gray which is even more relevant here than the post I took it from, “New Study Shows A Clear Millennial Solar Impact Throughout Holocene.”

In case any of us here thought attepts to shut down bloggers would be impossible and that the idea of such heavy-handedness is silly conspiracy mongering, this is what she alerts us to:

Late yesterday afternoon, I read something that sent chills down my spine.

Mr. Ray Finkelstein QC, a left-wing former Federal Court Judge with no media experience, at the request of the Gillard Government, issued a 400 page report which calls for a Big Brother Super-Regulator to ‘regulate’ political speech and – among other things – impose new laws with the power to stop climate change realists from speaking up.

Its “recommendations” will sicken every single Australian: They actually call for a Big Brother Super-Regulator to censor not just the newspapers and TV, but websites, personal blogs, and even what you say on Twitter!

This is a proposal that would seem right at home in North Korea or Zibmabwe. I never thought – as dark as things seemed- we could stoop this low here in Australia.

It is clear from the report, in particular paragraphs 4.31-4.42, that silencing climate realists is a major reason for these regulations: it is unashamedly explicit in this (and even uses the dirty trick of using polls from – wait for it – 1966 as evidence the media is pro-climate skeptic, and that – wait for it – only the ABC is unbiased!)

The size and scope of the proposed Super-Regulator is breathtaking. They will have the power to impose a “code of ethics”, force you to print views you don’t agree with as part of a ‘right of reply’, take you to court, and even make you take pieces down! Even personal blogs that get only 40 hits a day will be covered! To make matters worse, the SuperRegulator “would not have to give reasons for its decisions” and the decisions “would not be subject to appeal.” Even climate change websites in other countries like Watt’s Up With That will be covered by this!

Aaaand another thing. Here in Canada, our otherwise very good Conservative government is inexplicably trying to table a bill to allow the police to monitor individual accounts suspected of accessing child pornography without having to go through the bother of going before a judge, showing due cause and obtaining a warrant. This bill would also require ISPs to spend a lot of money to maintain databases and to keep surfing data for a long time.

The good news is that even though our justice ministry presented the proposal as a justifiable measure to protect children and even hinted that only pedophiles could object to it, Canadians are in an uproar and are not buying this scare-them-and-shame-them tactic. Having thousands of newly hired desk cops munching on donuts all day and fishing around the internet, soon interpreting on their own what child pornography may or may not mean, targetting “problem” people and ignoring favoured ones and soon enough expanding the scope of their investigations into other “very important” areas sent the proverbial chill down our spines. Let’s make no mistake about it, our hard-fought rights which resulted in the break-up of MSM’s monopoly on information and opinion are under steady assault from many areas, under many rationales and guises, sometimes even by otherwise friendly sectors and for justifiable causes, and only vigilance and open discussion can keep the “Huns” from the gates.

Allan MacRae says:
March 4, 2012 at 1:38 am
Re: • It is basically anti-civilization. In its essence, eco-extremism rejects virtually everything about modern life. We are told that nothing short of returning to primitive tribal society can save the earth from ecological collapse. No more cities, no more airplanes, no more polyester suits. It is a naive vision of a return to the Garden of Eden.
—————–

To this end they have infiltrated the education system to teach a fictional fisics, from which aeroplanes could not be built. Deliberately dumbing down the general population so what’s left after their eugenics solution will have no real science education.*

Like all self-obsessed psycho/sociopaths, they haven’t the nous to understand consequences anymore than they can understand where creativity comes from, that it is no respector of persons.

*If those reading here think “gases have no buoyancy” and “shortwave from the Sun heats land and oceans”, you’re already in this category. The AGWSF KT97 and tweaks energy budget is the fictional fisics you’ve been taught, impossible in the real world.

So, can anyone tell this non-scientist how “bio-fuel” is supposed to help the whole CAGW thing, since proponents of one are almost invariably proponents of the other.

Let me see if I have my facts straight. Carbon emissions are the problem, and a huge source of carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels, so if we switch to bio-fuels… well, what exactly?

You are switching from burning fuel and emitting carbon to an energy source where you burn fuel and emit carbon just to make the fuel, and then emit carbon all over again when you actually use the fuel? And yet nuclear power is still absolutely verboten?

Am I the only one who doesn’t understand this ridiculous contradiction?

Over the years they have exposed themselves as collectivist, paranoid and far more of a political movement than a scientific. Nowadays besides the scientific discussions themselves they rarely fail to pick on ‘right wing’ opponents, as if science is not about measurement and knowledge but ideology. Well, for them it is, but not for anyone else.

Those immune to the hysteria see lots of extremely weak minded people being manipulated by a few powerful crooks manipulating their trust and immaturity to wreck as much of society as possible, and to them see no end of the mission to carry on removing our rights and wealth although as based on alleged facts they cannot maintain the illusion for ever. Truth has to leak, as it did with the latest glacier data and one by one when new measurements are made each of their pillars will fall. The fact a Canadian witness testified in court polar bears had a healthy population of 25,000 and it was only reported on one website proves every time something catches them out the media always keep well away bar a couple of British columnists who carry out the work between them while their papers publish alarmist articles as well, sometimes in the same issue as they have no interest in facts, just stories.

Peter Kovachev says: March 4, 2012 at 11:15 am
“Allan MacRae, that’s a very important point to remember, the collapse of the socialists in the West due to their unsustainable narratives, as streams of refugees, unjustifiable brutalities by communist and socialist regimes and finally, the economic collapse of those systems….”

Thank you Peter for your worthwhile observations. I recall one of the leaders of the national socialist NDP Party in Canada, spouting off about how Canada should emulate East Germany, which he called “the Workers’ Paradise”.

Based on the East Germany I saw in 1989, he was either a subversive or just one of the Soviets’ “useful idiots”. They used to trot these imbeciles around their Potemkin villages, showing off happy dancing workers, and then send them home to spread their falsehoods.

East Germany was portrayed in the Canadian press as the “industrial powerhouse” of the Soviet Bloc – in fact, it was an utterly primitive backwater compared to its West German counterpart.

Your point about the sudden, strange conversion of pro-Soviet Western leftists to the environmental movement is also interesting, since there was NO environmental movement in the Soviet Bloc, and severe pollution of air, water and soil was endemic.

Allan MacRae says:
March 5, 2012 at 3:03 pm… I recall one of the leaders of the national socialist NDP Party in Canada, spouting off about how Canada should emulate East Germany, which he called “the Workers’ Paradise”.

Sounds like our Ed Broadbent. Otherwise a bright chap and on the whole a principled fellow (so, most likely a “useful idiot”), on the wrong political side who like many, went overboard with his adulation of communism for a while, but then became more mainstream. It was weird moving to Canada as a kid in 1972. We had just witnessed the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the increasing brutality as the neo-Stalinists re-took and consolidated their grip, but over here, people were falling in love with socialism and were actually pining for the same system we had to crawl under wires to get away from. Go figure.

“East Germany was portrayed in the Canadian press as the “industrial powerhouse” of the Soviet Bloc – in fact, it was an utterly primitive backwater compared to its West German counterpart.” Ha! What was scary is that it actually was a powerhouse…comparatively speaking. East Block engineers and technicians dreamed of work contracts there. This tells you a lot about the utter disaster the USSR and the rest of the Warsaw Pact had become industrially. Big factories belching smoke 24/7, employing entire towns and producing little but industrial waste.

Your point about the sudden, strange conversion of pro-Soviet Western leftists to the environmental movement is also interesting, since there was NO environmental movement in the Soviet Bloc, and severe pollution of air, water and soil was endemic. Apart from the rare and organized tours, there never was any actual connection or communication between Western leftists and Eastern Europe’s inmates, the workers in their paradise. And a good thing that was too, for while the Western “kids” and “beatiful people” might have manged to look away from the smog and rivers of chemicals, had they shown up there looking the way they did, a local committee of retirees, with the help of a chain-smoking, almost-sober milicia goon would have dragged them to the nearest barber for a buzz-cut and confiscated the banned bell-bottoms and Levi jeans…to be sold on the black market to children of Party officials. Wisely the two sides decided not to mingle too much.

@Allan McRae;
The West German heavy equipment we were being asked to review was so primitive …
;)
______

Wade says:
March 15, 2012 at 5:33 pm
…
But if there is anything I’ve learned over the year is that people who thirst for power don’t give up until they have what they want. Two things corrupt more than anything else: money and power. Climate scientists have been corrupted by both.

The original, and more accurate, quotes are:
that the love of money is the source of all evil.
that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It is noteworthy that Mann was promoted to dept. head right out of his PhD program, way beyond his competence, as a result of some big grant-raising hits. His further stupefaction has proceeded apace, as a Hokey Team mover and shaker.